New AI-powered innovations on Coursera: Role Play for Authors, Course Builder for Partners, Skill Tracks for Enterprise, and more

By Patrick Supanc, Chief Product Officer

Today at our annual conference, Coursera Connect, we announced several new and expanded AI-powered product capabilities designed to better serve our learners, partners, and customers. These innovations will help learners master the right skills to grow their careers, enable partners to create high-quality and engaging content, and empower employers to drive better outcomes with their learning programs.

Role Play: Building essential skills through real-world practice

Launching next month, Role Play is a new course activity that enables learners to build job-ready skills and practice soft skills through dynamic, back-and-forth interactions with AI personas:

• Author-controlled and customizable - Educators and partners can design realistic scenarios, assign roles, and help learners practice key skills that align with course objectives.
• Build learner confidence and career readiness - Learners receive personalized, actionable feedback and are better prepared to apply their skills on the job.
• Serve employer and institutional needs - Role Play offers a new, scalable way to develop and assess in-demand skills like leadership and collaboration.

Expanding Course Builder to Partners
Course Builder is our GenAI-powered authoring platform, enabling institutions to use AI to design courses at scale. Since its launch in 2023, Course Builder has helped our enterprise customers to launch over 4,000 new private enterprise courses and reduced median course creation time by 87%.

We're now excited to make Course Builder available to our educator partners, helping them build and scale high-quality content for Coursera's global learning catalog at a much faster pace. Every feature has been designed with speed, simplicity, and pedagogical excellence in mind, and built on insights from Coursera's extensive learner base. New and enhanced features include:

• Authoring from Scratch with just a course idea - no outline or material required.
• Course Ingestion of existing materials with standard formats like Common Cartridge.
• Instructional Design Guidance from an AI-powered coach.
• Hands-on Learning integrations, like Dialogue and Role Play.
• AI-graded questions to power your assessments.*

These new features are currently available to a select number of partners and enterprise customers. We will continue to refine them based on feedback before making them broadly accessible.*

Enabling Smarter Assessments and Supporting Learner Motivation
Effective learning requires both rigorous evaluation and sustained momentum. These new capabilities give educators scalable ways to assess higher-order skills while helping learners stay motivated through timely feedback and milestones.

• AI-Graded Questions - Design open-ended assessments across formats like essays, code, and video. AI-generated rubrics and automated scoring save time and ensure fairness.
• AI-Powered Peer Review - Enhance the peer review process with AI scoring and immediate feedback. Learners can reattempt assignments to improve scores, and gain deeper insights.
• Helping Learners Maintain Motivation and Momentum - Support good learning habits with new session-level milestones, timely nudges, and moments of recognition to help boost completion rates.

Safeguarding Academic Integrity
Employers want learning tied directly to the roles and tasks of their teams - and they need proof that those skills transfer on the job. That's why verified skill assessments matter: they show real mastery, not just course completion. Over the last year, we've enhanced our academic integrity features, and since May, have proctored over 15,000 exams - reducing plagiarized submissions by 90% and overall misconduct by 95%. We're expanding these tools to uphold rigor and consistency at scale:

• Coursera Proctoring & Locking Browser - In the GenAI era, it is critical for instructors to have the ability to monitor webcam, microphone, and screen activity. Browser locking can restrict access to external applications or resources, maintaining fairness during high-stakes assessments.
• Course Profiles - New Course Profiles will make it easier for institutions to enforce consistent integrity standards across their programs. These centralized settings enable key academic integrity features at scale to protect the credibility of their learning and credentials.

Announcing Skill Tracks - a tailored, data-driven learning solution
We're also excited to announce Skill Tracks, a data-backed learning solution mapped to specific occupations that guides learners from foundational knowledge to expert proficiency through verified skill paths. Powered by Coursera's Career Graph, Skill Tracks precisely map the relationships between jobs, skills, and learning content. Key features include:

• Tailored learning - Combine content from leading universities and industry partners with your own materials to match company tools, workflows, and priorities.
• Verified credentials - Learners advance through real-world assessments that prove skills are mastered, not just completed.
• Business goals alignment - Ongoing tracking and updates keep learning current with market needs and directly tied to business performance.

Starting today, four Skill Tracks are available: GenAI, Software and Product, IT, and Data, with more to follow. Each Skill Track offers a structured learning experience that clearly defines the critical skills and courses employees need at each role and experience level. Click here to read the announcement.

We have also made significant strides in increasing global access and reducing language barriers to learning:

• We now have 5,600 courses available in up to 26 languages. This means over half our catalog is now available in multiple languages - enabling more than 50% of the world's population to take a course in their native language on Coursera.
• By the end of the year, we'll expand AI dubbing to nearly 1,000 courses across five languages - bringing world-class instruction to more learners in more languages than ever before.

We're excited to build the foundation for learning in the age of AI. By combining powerful technology with trusted content, we're ushering in a new era of opportunity - one where every learner can prove their skills, every institution can scale its impact, and every organization can keep pace with change.

Watch Coursera CEO, Greg Hart's keynote at Coursera Connect 2025 for demos of these new capabilities here.

Learn more about Skill Tracks here.

Read about our Content announcements here.